Saturday, November 20, 2010

I've been war-driving since 2000, and war-biking almost since I first started riding. I do this only occasionally. There are very few variations I can make to my current work commute that don't involve riding on roads that are unwise to use in rush-hour. It makes little sense to scan that route on a daily basis.

I don't scan for wireless networks in order to find ones that are easy to break into. They're all easy, in some way or another. And I don't have any need nor desire to break into other peoples' networks. I can tether with my phone from anywhere I can get a signal, and many places offer free wireless Internet to patrons. I'm not in the habit of poking around on networks I'm not supposed to be poking around on. I like my freedom, thank you very much.

When my friend Lorin started riding his bike to his new job, it was a massive increase in bicycle riding distance, and he started scanning for wireless networks on the way to and from work. Some time in the last 24 hours or so, Lorin threw down the gauntlet.

One thing I didn't mention last night is that I went ahead and brought my warbiking rig along for the ride. I think CommuterDude was the only one that knew what I was up to. It made lots of sense, because the route went through many small residential byways that many normal war-drivers would completely miss. The two 19dBi omnidirectional antennae were mounted very surreptitiously to my panniers. In case anyone's wondering, I saw 423 wireless networks along the route, with more than 300 of those being brand new to the WiGLE database that Lorin and I are using to track this stuff. Of course, I have a 7-year-long head start on Lorin. We'll see if he can catch up. And I suppose this means I'll be canvassing wireless everywhere I go a lot more often.

6 comments:

You have such a huge head start. But I'm willing to keep after it. In six weeks, I've picked up over 6K new networks. I just have to do some serious criss-crossing of the small neighborhoods. Lenexa and OP are rich with signals to catalog.

That's easy. Root for the hackers as we will inherit the earth. No, that's the meek. OK, so root for the home team. Um, but we're all cycling geeks in KC. OK, I've got it. Root for yourself. Join us and let's get KC catalogued.

BTW, it is customary to reply to a challenge in the same forum where it was issued. What? No comments on my blog? Do you not recognize WordPress as a noble platform that is worthy of your participation?

One small problem CyclingRoo... I live in Houston. I suppose I could also throw my hat in the ring but I would wind up eclipsing everyone (Except folks from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.) I also need to come up with a more compact rig. My ancient Dell Inspiron 8100 works fine as a classic wardriving rig, but war biking with it just isn't going to happen.

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